Ego-Centric vs. Exo-Centric Tracking and Interaction in Smart Spaces

In the recent paper published at SUI 2014,”Exploring Gestural Interaction in Smart Spaces using Head-Mounted Devices with Ego-Centric Sensing”, co-authored with Barry Kollee and Tony Dunnigan, we studied a prototype Head Mounted Device (HMD) that allows the interaction with external displays by input through spatial gestures.

In the paper, one of our goals was to expand the scope of interaction possibilities on HMDs, which are currently severely limited, if we consider Google Glass as a baseline. Glass only has a small touch pad, which is placed at an awkward position on the devices rim, at the user’s temple. The other input modalities Glass offers are eye blink input and voice recognition. While eye blink can be effective as a binary input mechanism, in many situations it is rather limited and could be considered socially awkward. Voice input suffers from recognition errors for non-native speakers of the input language and has considerable lag, as current Android-based devices, such as Google Glass, perform text-to-speech in the cloud. These problems were also observed in the main study of our paper.

We thus proposed three gestural selection techniques in order to extend the input capabilities of HMDs: (1) a head nod gesture, (2) a hand movement gesture and (3) a hand grasping gesture.

The following mock-up video shows the three proposed gestures used in a scenario depicting a material selection session in a (hypothetical) smart space used by architects:

We discounted the head nod gesture after a preliminary study showed a low user preference for such an input method. In a main study, we found that the two gestural techniques achieved performance similar to a baseline technique using the touch pad on Google Glass. However, we hypothesize that the spatial gestural techniques using direct manipulation may outperform the touch pad for larger numbers of selectable targets (in our study we had 12 targets in total), as secondary GUI navigation activities (i.e., scrolling a list view) are not required when using gestures.

In the paper, we also present some possibilities for ad-hoc control of large displays and automated indoor systems:

Ambient light control using spatial gestures tracked by via an HMD.

Considering the larger picture, our paper touches on the broader question of ego-centric vs exo-centric tracking: past work in smart spaces has mainly relied on external (exo-centric) tracking techniques, e.g., using depth sensors such as the Kinect for user tracking and interaction. As wearable devices get increasingly powerful and as depth sensor technology shrinks, it may, in the future, become more practical to users to bring their own sensors to a smart space. This has advantages in scalability: more users can be tracked in larger spaces, without additional investments in fixed tracking systems. Also, a larger number of spaces can be made interactive, as the users carry their sensing equipment from place to place.